


Thundering Waves

by jenniarnold



Category: Riddle-Master Trilogy - Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 18:46:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9285218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenniarnold/pseuds/jenniarnold
Summary: A story that takes place in the same universe as Patrica Mckillip's Riddle-Master series.Wave after wave assaulted the land while homes fell to the force. The wall of destruction was made of more than sand and the wind. The people who lived through the storm knew that the wave was made of pure fear. Sand may have been what was left in their homes, and in their eyes, but the true enemy was not the small grains of sand. The enemy so much more than that.Men like Corin had to fight that enemy every day. He had faced storms and survived. He had seen men, good men, die for no reason. Men had followed him to their doom. Corin had survived but he wished that he had fallen with them. He had survived but now he rode in a cage.





	

Chapter 1: Wizards and Witches  
Wave after wave assaulted the land while homes fell to the force. The wall of destruction was made of more than sand and the wind. The people who lived through the storm knew that the wave was made of pure fear. Sand may have been what was left in their homes, and in their eyes, but the true enemy was not the small grains of sand. The enemy so much more than that.  
Men like Corin had to fight that enemy every day. He had faced storms and survived. He had seen men, good men, die for no reason. Men had followed him to their doom. Corin had survived but he wished that he had fallen with them. He had survived but now he rode in a cage.   
The bars pressed into his back and reminded him where he was. The moans and cries of the injured could hardly let him forget! No reminders were persistent enough to make Corin forget where this fiasco started. It all began in Anuland with his father.  
~*~  
"Three more have been found, sire," a guard in a blue uniform said.  
"I'll go. I can stop this," Corin almost begged his father.  
"I will not lose my only son."  
"I will not die there!" Corin's voice rang through the halls. "I promise it. I'm too curious to die!"  
"You may die on Windplain." Corin's father spoke the facts in a quiet voice. "Do not make promises you cannot keep."   
"Saving our people would be worth your unraveling and mine as well."  
"Go! Go then! Do not let your ghost haunt me," the father declared in anger.  
"I want answers and not clean lines,"   
His eyes were alive with fire and pain. He had nothing but unsolved questions. His thoughts were awake in his mind but his body was pushing exhaustion. Hands slid over his face and his tired eyes seemed to wake.   
"Death can be found in the light of the fire," Corin's father warned. "What gives life can also take it."  
The knowledge seemed to bring Corin to a strange, uneasy calm.  
"We use fire to cook either way. Can I go?"  
He had a light, graceful step because love was more than a memory. He could find music. Love and peace. Everyone else in the room spoke of warnings but Corin knew the sound of destiny. Firelight shivered over him, weaving patterns of light and shadow in the air. He sat in the silence of trees and a face of granite. Corin listened to it, realizing that silence was not the evasion of an answer, but the answer itself.  
His heart beat suddenly, painfully, in his throat. He wanted to speak but he could not.  
Corin moved then, unbound from the silence. Words seemed gripped in his chest and in his clenched hands as if he dared not let them go.  
His father was also reluctant to speak. He stirred a little, stiffly, then stilled again, gazing down at a star of candlelight reflected on the table. Finally, the older man spoke,  
"I had not realized there was a limit to my own endurance but you have found it."  
That was as good as a "yes" from any other man.  
"Windplain," Corin named it. "I will go."  
"Make sure that you come back," the king in Anuland all but commanded his son with a firm hug.  
Corin son of Gaton of Anuland, left his home and traveled for days through the country looking for a monster that no one had seen. Dead bodies had been found after every wave. It was not unusual for people to die during the waves but it was unusual to see so much blood. Sand suffocated people at the height of the wave. There was not a drop of blood on a suffocation victim's body.   
The corpses that appeared in Anuland looked like they had been mauled by animals. They were covered in blood. Corin would have assumed that the bodies were killed by animals but no animals traveled during a wave. They would have been killed by the sand. The corpses appeared minutes after the wave had passed. Witnesses all described a monster with glowing eyes and black claws.  
Corin knew that he could not trust all the witness accounts but he had a place to start. These witnesses needed to be questioned. They were from different areas and economic stations. There were merchants, farmers, and nobles from all over. Other dukedoms spoke of similar problems. No one was willing to do anything about it.  
Corin was about to change all of that.  
"I can't believe that your father lets you go," Sir Loien said with a grin.  
"I can make logical, persuasive arguments when I need to."  
"The Duke of Anuland is allowing his only heir to travel so near to the king's forest?" Sir Nathan asked with incredulity.  
"We're not going through the forest itself," Corin argued.  
~*~  
That night, the men of Anuland traveled through the countryside. Open fields stretched for miles on their left and the king's forest loomed on the right. No one wanted to sleep so near to the forest so the men continued riding through the night. Eventually, the group came to an overhang of cliffs. The chasms were too narrow. Each man would have to travel through on foot one-by-one.  
The men naturally formed a line and placed Corin at the center. The men marched ahead of their horses as if walls of stone surrounded them. They were comfortable and confident, even though uncertainty lay both ahead and behind. The men moved like a contingent of guards. They moved like one, massed and prickling like a hedgehog, with Corin as their center.   
Something moved through the group of knights until she stood directly before Corin. No one moved. It did not take Corin long to see that no one could move. Time seemed to have stopped.  
"What are you?" Corin asked in awe and wonder.  
"You don't question a riddler with a sword," the woman said the words with a voice full of malice.   
Corin soon saw the shadows of other beings moving between his men. He found himself closed in by shadows.  
"Summon my attendants. Leave the man to me." The rapier loosed him. His eyes clung to his cousin until guards falling into ranks around him hid him from view.   
"What do you want of me? Why am I here?"  
"You are here because you want to stop a monster. I want to kill it too," the witch answered simply.  
"You know about the monster?"  
"I have seen it before. It will not escape me this time."  
"My people and I would gladly accept your help."  
"A wave will be coming this way. Your men will be trapped out here and the monster will strike again. Bring your men to my house. They can take shelter there and we will seek the monster together while the storm rages."  
Corin nodded.  
His men came back to themselves in an instant. The witch in front of Corin was the first change they noticed.  
"You will follow me now," the witch said with an air of command.  
The witch walked beside Corin, one hand on his shoulder. The men watched his stiff back, his red, clenched fists. They followed all the same.  
The witch led them to a fine cottage. Dark woods and warm fires covered entryway but the cottage itself was made of two rooms. The rooms were not small but they did not have the welcoming feel of the entryway. The wallpaper was faded and torn in places. The furniture was worn. The two rooms could not have been more different. Where one was dark, the other was light.  
Corin turned to ask the witch if she lived here but he saw that she was no longer there. A new woman stood with her hand on his arm. She was old and she was angry.  
A terrible spray of words left the witch's mouth and sent Corin's men to their knees. Each held his head and groaned. Nathan fell to the ground, dead. More men joined him each second. Corin pulled his arm, trying to free himself but the grip only tightened.  
"What are you doing?" Corin demanded. "You said you could help fight this monster."  
"You will bring me the head of this monster," the witch commanded.  
"I will! I will! Just stop killing them.   
"Your men are not dead. I cannot have them disturbing us."  
"Where do I find it?"  
"In the king's forest."  
"My men and I will go there. I will bring it back to you."  
"Be sure that you do." The witch was commanding now.  
He felt hands as cool and smooth as the glass behind him slide around his throat and tighten. "A word, my boy," he heard through the sudden black wind roaring through his head, "of warning." He woke some time later at the foot of the mirror, his throat as raw as if he had swallowed a rapier. He managed to find his feet and stumble into a nearby couch.   
~*~  
"Your father would never agree to this," Sir Loein said again.  
"He knows that I'll have the best knights to protect me," Corin said.  
"You're going to need all of us in those forests."  
Crossing the king's forest was a problem. The forest became public land in the reign of Corin's great-grandfather and it had been overrun by bandits ever since. Traveling through the land was dangerous. Still, Corin would have a squad of his father's men traveling with him. What could go wrong?  
Corin found exactly what could go wrong two nights later.  
That was when the slavers found him.  
The witch had set him up. She was watching him from the heart of the forest, wearing a different face again. Only this face was more accurately the lack of a face.  
He watched her pull parts of herself back out of the charcoal whirlpool that had stolen them and reattach them, muttering a trenchant mix of spell and imprecation. The best she could do was a withered black carrot for a thumb, a crumpled leaf for an ear, and a dead-white eyebrow. Looking into a mirror, she had spat at her reflection. The glass melted where her spittle ran down.   
"Bring him. Kill the rest."  
"No! You promised me hope! You promised me a truth!" Corin struggled but the struggle and travel had made him weak. The slavers dragged him into another house.  
Then she had turned to Corin, who was slumped on the floor, one arm dangling from a metal cuff on a chain and growing numb. "As for you," the Black Pearl said harshly, staring into Corin's expressionless eyes. "You will stay with the slavers as bait. I will refuse every offer your father makes for you until he is forced to come for you. Then he will reckon with me. He will become mine in name, in thought, in heart. I will use him against Anuland as he used you against me and you won't even be here."  
She took his face then. Corin saw his own face smiling down at him before darkness took him.  
~*~  
He was torn between anger and fear. Time touched his heart suddenly, like the words of a spell. He had no business taking more but want called out to him in ways he could not ignore. The thought of the sea, between him and his home and his heart, chilled.  
Corin felt like he had been in the rolling cage for years. He could feel his body and mind changing. The slavers fed the slaves as little as possible. He could feel the strength leaving his body. He could feel the confidence of youth leave his mind.   
Corin was no longer the son of a duke. He was just another slave. He had been beaten and cursed. Everything he owned had been taken from him. He no longer even had a name. He was only a tattoo. All that he had was now gone. The only way left to go was forward.  
Corin heard the waves of a sand storm crashing outside. Walls folded down around the cage to create a shelter from the wave. He heard the voice of the storm rage outside. He heard the voices calling him and pulling his anger.  
"I sware a vow in the name of my ancestors, oh wave. I sware a vow of power in your name. If you grant me the power, I will bring you a witch. The red witch who sent me here."  
Corin felt power crush him then. It fell into him on all sides. The storm had accepted his offer.


End file.
